3Crowd Raises $6.6M to Disrupt the CDN Industry

3Crowd Technologies, which provides a set of tools for managing content delivery through the cloud, has raised $6.6 million in a Series A round of financing from Canaan Partners and Storm Ventures, the San Mateo-based startup said today. The funding follows an angel round announced late last year that came from Kevin Rose, Jay Adelson, Storm Ventures and Greenwich Technology Associates. As part of the latest round, Canaan General Partner Maha Ibrahim will join the 3Crowd board.

3Crowd was founded by former Bitgravity co-founder Barrett Lyon. With its CrowdMonitor and CrowdDirector products, 3Crowd says it can blend multiple CDNs into a single cloud-based delivery platform, lowering the cost of video delivery and providing better quality.

In the process, 3Crowd will cut into the revenues of CDN providers like Akamai, Limelight and Level 3, which are already struggling with rapidly falling prices for video delivery. Unlike CDN providers that are currently on the market, 3Crowd doesn’t charge a per-bit fee for delivery, but instead takes a small fee based on the number of requests that a customer receives.

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